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LAYC's Director of Learning and Evaluation, Isaac Castillo, is featured in the July Venture Philanthropy Partners Newsletter. The article is listed below. Congratulations Isaac!

Changing Performance Culture: Isaac Castillo, Latin American Youth Center

Growing up in El Paso, Texas, Isaac Castillo wondered why some of his schoolmates turned to gangs, drugs, and other negative behaviors while he and his friends threw themselves into their studies, joined the debate team, and later went to college and graduate school.

"What happened to make some go down a different path? Were they pushed in one direction by their families? Was it the parenting?" Castillo asks. Today, as Director of Research and Evaluation at the Latin American Youth Center in Washington, DC, he still asks these questions, and the answers he finds help the organization refine, adjust, and add new programs that help put youth on a positive path.

In his own case, Castillo believes that it was the support of his parents and also finding his passion, debating, that helped him forge his future.

"Debating helped me develop a comfort with public speaking, and it was where I felt like intellect was rewarded. I devoted my time to it much the way an athlete trains. I went to debate camps at Baylor University and Michigan, which exposed me and opened my eyes to the bigger world," he says, adding that debating pushed him towards a career in policy research.

He enrolled in Syracuse University, where he was on the debate team while he earned a Bachelor degree in Human Resource Management. Originally, he wanted to pursue a career in business, specifically in human resources. His thought was that he could help people navigate through the business world. However, as he learned more about the policy world through debate, he started to become interested in figuring out ways to help youth and young adults lead better lives.

After college, Castillo went to the University of Rochester to earn a Master of Science in Public Policy Analysis. He also served as the Assistant Director of Speech and Debate there, a position that funded his graduate education.

Soon after graduation he landed a position at COSMOS Corporation, a Bethesda-based research company that provides applied research and evaluation, technical support, and management assistance. There he worked on a number of studies dealing with minority populations and youth issues, including a study for the CDC on health disparities among minority populations, substance abuse and prevention, violence and gang prevention, and how to strengthen after school programs. "You name it--anything related to youth development, I touched," Castillo recalls.

As part of his work in gang prevention and identifying successful interventions, Castillo scanned the news headlines weekly. During one of those scans, he saw an article in the Washington Post about the Latin American Youth Center and its executive director Lori Kaplan. Intrigued, he checked out the organization´s website and saw that they were looking for someone to fill the newly created position of Director of Training and Evaluation. "I read the job description and it was like they were looking for me. I sent in my resume on a Thursday afternoon and had an offer for an interview the following Monday. I wasn't really looking. It was just fate," he said.

LAYC´s leadership understood the importance of performance measurement, and were committed to changing the culture: "While LAYC had always been committed to getting the best results and outcomes for our young people, we did not have the capacity to implement our understanding of how data and outcome measurement could be a learning tool leading to better results. This was our challenge. As Executive Director, I did not want our commitment to evaluation to be externally driven. I wanted data collection and outcome measures to be meaningful and relevant to our staff and board of directors," said Lori Kaplan. Castillo´s new job was to turn that desire into a reality.

When he arrived at LAYC, Castillo says three challenges confronted him:

• A lack of good data on the youth whom they served
  The organization did not have accurate information on the number of youth served and their demographic characteristics. In addition, when data was available, it was frequently duplicative or inconsistent.
• No hard data on programs and effectiveness
  The organization had lots of anecdotal information about the success of their programs, but there was no qualitative or quantitative data that supported those claims.
• No culture of data collection and management
  The organizational culture did not value data collection and what little was being done was to satisfy funders. The organization and its people did not see data collection as a benefit to gauge what was working and how they could use data to improve services to participants; rather, data collection was viewed as additional work with little value.

Castillo realized that to address these challenges he had to start with the culture, so he launched an internal marketing campaign for data collection and evaluation. His debate skills were invaluable in helping to persuade LAYC´s program staff that tracking their work and measuring outcomes had great benefits. During his first two months, he met with every staffer involved with direct services. He sought to understand their work and also to make the pitch that he was a resource that would help make their job easier and help them to serve youth better.

In those first conversations, he steered clear of discussions about how and what data to collect, focusing instead on the benefits of data collection for their work. He asked them provocative questions: What do you hope to achieve? How do you know what you know about your work and the youth you are serving? What kind of information would be helpful for you to collect to understand the success of your program?

Over time resistance started to fade. Within six months, he had a small group of staffers who had benefited from the work and had become strong advocates within the organization. He held them and their use of data collection as models in the organization´s staff meetings. After 18 months, he hit a tipping point.

"At 18 months, people started to get it. It took that long because we are big--at the time we had 150 employees. It takes a while to get people to buy into something as big as this. I had created pockets of advocates for outcomes measurement and data collection. I had a cadre of staff advocates saying this is helpful to me and my programs, and then it snowballed from there where 99% of the people were on board," Castillo recalls.

Prior to his arrival, LAYC had purchased Efforts to Outcomes, a software tracking program to monitor its progress and programs. Because it was not user friendly, staff weren´t using it. Castillo pushed for refinements to the software and set up training for the staff. Again he met with some resistance because staff viewed entering information about their programs into the system as time spent away from providing direct services. But, over time, he helped them see the importance of tracking the performance of programs. They came to value it and committed to spending an hour a week on entering information into the system.

One of the things that Castillo is proudest of is that LAYC now has accurate and reliable data on whom they are serving and that they have been able to use that data to adjust and modify their programs to better serve youth. Through their research and evaluation, LAYC has uncovered programs that aren´t working. With this information, the organization could make informed decisions about how to modify or enhance programs, and, in some instances, discontinue ineffective ones. The systems that Castillo put in place, and his ability to build a culture that celebrates and embraces research and evaluation, have brought LAYC national recognition. Castillo and his team consult frequently to other nonprofits seeking to emulate what he has created.

"Despite the best of intentions, no nonprofit is perfect. In reality, good intentions are simply not enough and well-intentioned programs will sometimes lead to harm. Therefore, nonprofits have a social responsibility to track their outcomes and determine how each of their services can be improved. Anything less means that people are getting cheated out of the best possible services they could receive," Castillo says.

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